It is extraordinarily frustrating to spend two and a half hours cleaning up problems created by a developer not even on the same continent as yourself. Especially when there's a big pile of unit tests that exist for the sole purpose of letting people know when they broke something they didn't mean to break.

Especially when the thing you were actually in there to fix was two lines of code that disappeared when the same developer deleted them a couple months ago0.

Especially when I spent 4 hours last week cleaning up a big check-in he put together.

I'm pretty sure the bulk of this problem is caused by the communications problems that arise when part of your development staff isn't in the same room, especially when it isn't on the same continent, in the same timezone, or in the same hemisphere. But, I don't really care about the why.

I was informed yesterday the interface to a library introduced in our current release is changing in our next-current0 release, to support a change in our data model: function A is being replaced with function B, which has the same parameters and return type with a different name.

Although function B is named more accurately than function A with respect to current understandings, this could have been avoided by giving A a more generic name in the first place, and the description is not so wrong as to confuse anybody currently working on the project. I suggested that function A could, instead, be rewritten to perform the new behavior, thereby reducing impact on other code. I was told that perhaps I would like to write the library, next time.

Not that it was ever an option, because $other_developer would rather pull an 80 hour week than delegate work he finds interesting. Frustratingly, I like $other_developer, but I'd just as soon not have our next-current release be a bigger screw up than it's already going to be1.

I've read Monster Hunter Vendetta, am most of the way through Unseen Academicals, watched a movie or two, eaten some turkey, and have otherwise been a little too shelled from work to devote much time to life outside my head.

Two and a half more weeks to the end of the year, for me. I think I owe my employer two-hundred-odd unit tests and some additional code in the meantime, though.

Work-wise, I've been tied up in a release that's finally coming to a head ... about an hour from now.

Outside of work, RHIT homecoming has come and gone. Related to that, Verizon has been bugging me. It seems I have some charges on my next bill for text messages. I sent or received some 40-odd messages trying to stay abreast of doings in the Haute.

Related: Legos are expensive, but I think I won the trip to Toys R Us. (Go me?)

Also noticed: guy in the pawn shop with a GPS ankle bracelet. I'm guessing a restraining order was involved, because he didn't seem to be under house arrest.

I seem to have picked up some sort of infection in the Haute or just before or after, and took almost long enough to get my butt to the doctor for things to become serious. Fortunately, they aren't, and time plus amoxycillin cures many a post-nasal drip. (Related: Zyrtec-D is fantastic.)

As far as things not related to bodily fluids are concerned, I got out to Knob Creek the last weekend of September, and mostly proved I'm so out of practice that I've forgotten what I'm doing (hammer bite!). A few trips to Open Range will work out some of the kinks, pistol-wise, but that just means I'll be back on the paper. And I need to build a target stand before I go back to KCR. The rentable stands weren't much three years ago, and they're even less now, regrettably.
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